The Magic of Teaching

Hello everyone!  It has been a millennium since I have blogged to say the least.  I have had one crazy year so far!  I got engaged, applied for a job in Virginia, took and interview, got hired that day, moved down a week later, got a lease on an apartment and started the week after.  I am also currently in graduate school and working very hard on planning my wedding.  It has been CRAZY, but it has been a great crazy!!! Anyway, I am very excited to find a little slice of time to share on my blog, I have missed it so!! Tonight I wanted to introduce you to my new little project I began working on this weekend. 

This year our school adopted the Math Daily 3 outline for teaching math.  This way of teaching has the teacher instruct students in a 10-15 minute mini lesson at the beginning of each class.  Then the teacher releases his/her students into their centers rotations. I use a 4 center rotation in my classroom.  These include a math facts center, hands on center, with the teacher center, and an at your seat center.  My students rotate to their centers in their groups for about 15 minutes each.  I usually get to 2 center rotations each day which then requires us to finish the other 2 rotations the next day.   

My school also decided to adopt the LEARN model method of lesson planning this year as well.  it is a detailed lesson plan specifically geared toward Math Daily 3.  one of the sections on the lesson plan requires the teacher to give a brief summary of what they will be doing for their 10-15 minute introduction lesson.  Although it sounds quite easy to come up with a 10-15 minute mini lesson it ended up being more difficult then I thought.  I talked with many different teachers and we came up with some different ideas to mix things up and not continue to do the same routine for our introductions.  

I decided to take our ideas and begin created some presentations to use in my classroom to help the 10-15 minute introduction go more smoothly without a lot of set up.  I just created my first PPT today to use tomorrow with my kiddos.  This one is for our new unit of addition with regrouping.  I plan on putting the presentation up on the smartboard and having the students follow along with their white boards.  Here is what it looks like!!

I begin my presentation with a few review slides of what we learned in our introduction lesson.  Here are some examples:

I then go into creating slides that have practice problems on them for the kiddos to complete on their whiteboards and showing their work.

My first shot with this will be tomorrow and I am anxious to see how it works!  i will keep everyone posted!  I am hoping it is interactive enough for them!  I plan on having students solve the problems in their own way for problem 3 and then have at least 1 student show the class how they solved it!

So there ya have it!! I hope that my kiddos feel as excited about it as I do!!! Wish me luck!